Benjamin Stassen, like most young adults in their early 20s, had a FaceBook account and many others that he used online. As with all social media websites and websites in general Benjamin has usernames and passwords that kept others from accessing his accounts. Like everyone else, every time he used FaceBook (and other sites) he had to ‘sign-in’ in order to get into his account, and into his online life.

When Benjamin Stassen suddenly committed suicide in 2010 his distraught parents, hoping to gain some insight into why their beloved son had taken his own life, looked to his FaceBook and other social accounts for answers. They needed access to what is termed his ‘digital legacy’. What they got instead was a wall, unknowingly put up by Benjamin himself and guarded by ‘user agreements’, that made it extremely difficult to do that. In fact, it was almost impossible and has set off a debate about what constitutes ‘privacy’ after a loved one is deceased.

The Stassens eventually persuaded Google to give them access to their son’s email (through a court order) and FaceBook, grudgingly, followed suit but the problems they faced, and the concerns that their fight brought up, have shed light on an area of the internet that is still legally murky; who should get access to someone’s digital legacy in the event of their death and how can this be made legally possible?

It’s an important question to be sure. Many people have digital legacies that are quite extensive and even quite valuable. For example, what if a person has digital music that they have purchased and stored online in the cloud? Who has the right to this, and how does that person access it? Information, like that the Stassen’s were looking for, is the same and in some instances may be very important.

In the United Kingdom a study termed ‘Dying in a Digital Age’ found that although 4 out of 5 people have digital assets less than 10% of them have given any thought to how they will pass on these assets after they themselves pass on. Bank accounts, ISAs and online collections of digital art and music all have username and password protection but still very little in the way of protection for surviving family members.

The debate has just started and will get much more heated as more and more people pas that have digital legacies and no digital ‘last will and testament’ to say who gets access. Hopefully someday, when a solution is found, the light that was shed on this problem will have meant that Benjamin Stassen’s death was not completely in vain.

Social networks make the world more and more connected, and thus, we may be even more connected with the death of friends. An average user may have around 250 connections#, and that’s far more than the number of people we used to be connected to. Moreover, odds are that you will know rather quickly when someone you knew passes, when it used to be communication from the family.

If you have different friends group online, chances are that you don’t want to share everything with all of them. Considering you’re a gamer.. what’s the use of your character and equipment for your non gamer nephew? Considering you’re fascinated by sewing.. what’s the use of your sewing patterns for a neophyte? While you may have a repo on GitHub, what do you want your account to become? Remove it? Your personal goods can be really different : imagine the different ebooks, your MP3s or other music, DRM protected or not, your game characters, …

Another aspect that is not as sexy as before is all the financial and tax-related data. More and more countries allow for tax information collection online. And this is a really annoying issue. Previously, estate-planning attorneys used to go through physical papers, but now, the access can be more complicated.

The online ecosystem has opened new doors in life management and the different facets of your life. The ease of creating separate accounts makes it possible to categorize our online assets. Emails for work and for family can be stored on different accounts, and the sport club you manage can be linked to a third identity. To stop there, the best example is the difference between a game online currency and your bank account — while seeing the connection : “Some people who play videogames a lot develop characters or weapons with value, and those can be sold,” says Lewis Chamberlain, an investment adviser. “You might have a sword that could be sold on eBay for $800. Those are assets, and you’ve got to plan for that.”.

Of course, you may have some datas you don’t want anyone to see. You may also have different aspects to your life and would like to keep these aspects separated, in which case it may be a good practice to separate them digitally.

In this site, you will not find an exhaustive legal review of your data. Why ?

Laws can change depending on your location, the time of application, and from the changing policies of online service providers. The US are currently changing rights : it means that things can be different, even between two neighbouring states. The strategy proposed here is not to have legal issues for your executor to get back to your data. These processes can be time consuming and not worth the hassle in conditions where there are lots to do elsewhere. That’s why we do recommend you to prepare for an easy transmission of your belongings.

TL;DR#: let’s do the things quick and simply. A quick act can avoid long procedures afterwards.

As per today, laws are not uniform around the globe, even in a single country like the US. Connecticut, Idaho, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Indiana are the only states so far to have laws concerning post mortem digital asset management. And even within this group, assets are not classified evenly : for example, 2005 Connecticut only considered an email address in its text.

However, the common point is that the aim of passing laws is to grant access to the digital executor of the dead person.